Style and Voice

A skin both true and apt

Dunsany the Lord

One thing I’ve always struggled with is style. I read Lord Dunsany’s tales when I was young, and it is true (as I think Ursula K LeGuin pointed out) that all fantasy talesmen must endure a Dunsany period. To all those who work in this field, to read Dunsany is a rare and cunning trap. For the manner of his speech and choice of words is so exquisite and fair, that we all love it, and must ape it, unwittingly or helplessly. Indeed it is hard not to write like Dunsany when you are reading a lot of his work.

But there comes a time when none of us can extend or ape Dunsany, but we fail in it (for we are not, alas, Dunsany reborn) and must strike out on our own. But without this master to inform us how to spin our tales, how will we do it?

Style

Dunsany was a great stylist. Now by a writer’s ‘style’ I mean three things:

1. The manner of his speech, whether high middle or low
2. His choice of words, whether common or rare (and if rare what particular lode of rare words does he choose to mine)
3. How he puts together the parts of his tale: what sort of sentences and paragraphs he uses, how much speech and how much narration, and how he paces his tale

Voice

But by a talesman’s ‘voice’ I mean only the quality and character of the talesman himself. I do not mean any technical approach to a tale, that is whether to use first-person, third-person, objective or omniscient narrators. I mean instead something ineffable, this notion the audience forms of the talesman himself, judged only upon the evidence of his tales. This must include the tale the talesman chooses to tell, his attitude toward the persons and events of which he tells, and how near he stoops toward, or how far he stands apart from his audience.

In oral talesmanship, the talesman stands before his audience, and they form a personal relationship. He might be one of them, out with his buddies for a drink. He might be a stranger, a ‘professional’ on a stage. He might be a suspect in the investigation of a crime. He might be a company CEO delivering a presentation to his Board of Directors. In such a case the talesman can only choose from a limited number of voices. His audience won’t let him stray too far.

But in more distant forms, of which the most distant is the written word, the audience only glimpses their talesman through the medium of his tale, and he is thus freed to adopt a voice out of a much wider range.

And there is also the character of the talesman apart from his relation to his audience. Is he a happy or a glum soul? Is he full of fire or languid, or serene? Is he petty, noble, jealous, angry? These will all gleam through the chinks of his talespinning, and only the master talesman may mask such things and with any success adopt some untrue character for his telling.

Since so few of us are masters, it seems best to let our voices play out true, and not to hide them.

Style & Voice and Fantasy Tales

And I think we must say much the same for style, that if we are true to ourselves, and tell our tales honestly, the style will come in as it will. And yet for style there is another thing to ponder, and it is a great deal in telling tales of Eartherea, the half-glimpsed lands that seem so real, but are drenched with enchantment and strangeness.

This is what I mean.

We live on Earth, and our talesmen live on Earth as well, at least most of the time. And we live now, all of us. But in fantasy tales the lands and times that they tell of plant at least one foot in Eartherea, and maybe a time lost long ago, or one that never came, or another yet to be.

And if we speak of such things with the same voice we use to tell of how we went today to market, we talesmen would jar and jangle and clash with what we told, and we in the audience would not behold, or touch or hear or taste, the wonders of that land.

Put it simply: the style of a tale ought to fit its matter. The voice of the talesman ought to fit both matter and style. And all three, matter & style & voice, ought to fit together, and not fight or clash. Style and voice are but the skin that clads the flesh and bones of our tale, and the skin ought to suit the flesh and be true to it. Little good would it do a fly to have the skin of a rhinoceros.

One Way

For the talesman, one way to achieve this is to tell often and long about the same matter. The longer a talesman works within a genre, and a subgenre, and a sub-subgenre, the more he will come to settle into a way of working so that these three elements join and fit together. Rough edges will smooth, gaps will fill with the proper pieces, bonds will form. The talesman of Eartherea will also in the course of his work come to master his art, but I mean here more that he will come to know those far-off fields and times, and he will learn what does and does not suit them, both in what he thinks he glimpses from afar, and how he treats of it.

There are of course geniuses, as well as the odd ones among us who seem to have been born in the lands beyond. They seem to come to their tales by nature and with ease.

The rest of us must work at it. But the more we work, and the longer we work, the better we will master it, and claim the style and voice that best suits the edges of Eartherea in which we play.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 5 February 2008)